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Alexandre Bouchard-Côté used software to do the painstaking linguistic detective work to compare sound changes and the evolution of words over millennia that used to be done manually.

And it worked, Bouchard-Côté told the Star from the University of British Columbia, where he is a professor in the department of statistics.

“By knowing which words people used, we can understand what they ate, what type of technology they used,” he said.

It also helps to show that their 637 proto-languages, the roots of Austronesian tongues spoken today by 386 million people in southeast Asia and parts of the Pacific, were as rich and complex as any modern lexicon.

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They would, for example, have had “many more words for plants and animals” than we use in everyday speech, he said.

His system, described in a paper published in PNAS, held up in accuracy against the existing manual reconstructions of the ancient languages.

This “large-scale, automatic reconstruction” should eventually be available online to anyone, Bouchard-Côté said.

“You can never be sure” of how a language sounded 5,000 years ago, he admitted. But understanding where the sounds started and how they evolved as people fanned out across the world opens a window on “how humans learn and remember language.”

As more data feeds into the system “we will be able to do better and better educated guesses,” he said. Or possibly find “interesting connections in languages thought to be unrelated.”

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